After the terrible privations suffered by Florence during the siege under the Prince of Orange, her citizens were fain to bow their necks once more to the Medicean yoke. In obedience to an order _motu proprio, et de plenitudine potestatis_, from Clement VII., they declared that considering the excellent qualities, life and habits of the Most Illustrious Duke Alessandro de’ Medici, son of the late Magnificent Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, and in recognition of the many and great benefits received, both spiritual and temporal from the house of Medici, he was eligible to all offices of State. Ippolito, who had entered the Church unwillingly, had been made a Cardinal before he was twenty. “He was handsome and agreeable,” writes Varchi, “with a quick understanding and gifted with every grace and accomplishment, affable and pleasant to every man and most liberal towards all who excelled in war or letters, or in any of the liberal arts.... He knew Latin well, and wrote gracefully, both in prose and verse, in the Florentine idiom.... It is true that by nature he was superficial and fickle, and did many things solely out of vainglory and ambition.... When he understood, or heard from others, that Pope Clement had decided that the riches and the greatness of the house of Medici were to be continued by Alessandro and not by himself, a great change took place in him. He was seized with incredible anger and grief, as it seemed to him that being older, a nearer relation to the Pope and better endowed by nature, so rich an inheritance and so brilliant a marriage should rather be his: either not knowing, or not believing, the secret rumours that Alessandro was the son of Clement.” He left Rome in haste for Florence with the idea of seizing the State before Alessandro, who was in Flanders with his future father-in-law the Emperor, could arrive. The Pope despatched Bacio Valori after him laden with entreaties and promises, and after passing a few days in Florence and finding that he had no following, he returned to Rome. On the 4th July, Alessandro, who had been created Duke of Cività di Penna, entered Florence and dismounted at the Palazzo Medici, where he was received by the principal citizens. The exiled Florentines, who were plotting against the stern and dissolute rule of Alessandro, often met in Filippo Strozzi’s house in Rome, and their deliberations were always communicated to the Cardinal Ippolito de’ Medici. At last it was decided to send an embassy to Charles V. to complain of the tyranny of the Duke Alessandro and to expose his evil life. This sealed the fate of Ippolito. He died of poison in August, 1535, and the man he accused on his deathbed and who cynically admitted his crime, took refuge in Alessandro’s house in Via Larga.